Juan Afonso – Professor of GameDev and Creator of REALiTY

We thought REALiTY was cool. Then realized it was made from someone who actually teaches game development. Interested? Read ahead!

Tell us something about yourself

Hi there! name is Juan Afonso.
I’ve wanted to make games from the moment I played The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, on the SNES (I was about 5-8 years old). That game made it clear to me that this is what I want to do with my life.
From there I’ve done/learned all I could to be able to some day make my own games (2d/3d art, programming, music, design, etc)

Describe us your game

A simple puzzle game based on a dream I had. Consists of 5 Acts.-Learning-Conventions-Discard-Reach-FreeWith a meaning behind each one.Hope you like it.

Where did the game idea come from?

Personal experience / dream

What can you tell us about the development of the game?

I am the only developer/artist/designer. I woke up one morning after having a long and complex dream, and as I was going to write down what I had dreamt, it hit me. The only way I can express how each event felt is to make a game about it. And since dream memories fade quickly, I made it my personal challenge to finish the game in 24 hours or under. It ended up taking me around 18.5 hours from start to finish. The art was made using Unity3D geometric primitives, and animated by code, no external 3D modeling software was used.

after making REALiTY I had another idea floating around and made http://www.kongregate.com/games/ClairvoyanceDev/the-labyrinth in about 3-4 hours from 0 to 100%

What is the most important thing you learned when making this game?

Exploration as a Developer (creativity)

What advice would you tell people who are beginning with game development?

The advice I give my students on the faculty I teach Game Development/Programming at is that: you have to be clear of what you like, and why you like it. This matters to no one, except for yourself.
Once you have this answer the next step is making sure you like the PROCESS it self, by this I mean that make sure you like doing the task required to create/complete a game (this is not the same as liking the end product).

But! do not fear, never mistake being new at something with not liking something.
Making games is hard work, it’s the mash up of many disciplines , and even something simple like REALiTY that I’ve made in under 24 hours, it’s only so, because I’ve been doing this for the past 10 years.